FHM national report

The Forest Health Monitoring: National Status, Trends and Analyses reports are an annual series sponsored by the Forest Health Monitoring (FHM) program of the USDA Forest Service. These reports quantify the status of, changes to, and trends in a wide variety of broadly defined indicators of forest health. The indicators encompass forest insect and disease activity, wildland fire occurrence, drought, tree mortality, forest fragmentation, invasive plant species, and phenology change, among others.

This FHM national report is produced by members of the Forest Health Monitoring research team at North Carolina State University along with forest health monitoring researchers at the Eastern Forest Environmental Threat Assessment Center (EFETAC), a unit of the Southern Research Station of the Forest Service.

Visit www.fs.usda.gov/foresthealth/publications/fhm/fhm-annual-national-reports.shtml for links to each of these reports in their entirety, and for searchable lists of links to chapters included in the reports.

Click here for a presentation offering an overview of the national reports, given at the 2020 national Forest Health Monitoring Workshop in Raleigh, North Carolina.

This report has three specific objectives:

1) Present information about forest health from a national perspective, or from a multi-State regional perspective when appropriate.This includes repeated analyses of regularly collected indicator measurements allow for the detection of trends over time and help establish a baseline for future comparisons, as well as assessments of longer term forest health trends.

2) Present new techniques for analyzing forest health data as well as new applications of established techniques, often applied to longer timescales.

3) Present results of recently completed Evaluation Monitoring (EM) projects funded through the FHM national program. These project summaries determine the extent, severity, and/or cause of forest health problems, generally at a relatively fine scale.